1. Technical Field
The invention relates to providing tools for consumers to aid them in understanding their credit scores and how to take action to improve their credit scores. More particularly, the invention relates to a score estimating tool, a best action simulation tool, an easy error correction tool, and a score improvement tool.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is well known that when a consumer applies for credit, financial institutions look to three major credit bureaus to generate credit reports on that individual. They are Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Also used in evaluating the likelihood that a consumer will make good on his or her credit is a metric known as a credit score. Fair Isaac Corporation's FICO® score has become a standard score used in such evaluations. Given that consumers are becoming more and more technically and financially sophisticated, what is lacking are tools that keep up with such increase in sophistication. What is lacking are tools, put into the hands of consumers, that use data from actual bureau credit reports and actual FICO® scores of consumers to help them understand better how their behaviors affect their score and how to take action to improve their score.
It would be advantageous to provide a system and method that allows a user to easily dispute contents in bureau credit reports where logic component is linked to the user's actual credit report from the bureau.
It would be advantageous to provide a system and method that takes recent information from a consumer's credit reports as well as the consumer's credit score, e.g. FICO score, and generates a plan that the consumer can take to maximize the score.
It would be advantageous to provide a score estimator that allows consumers, by generating an estimate score, to glean a rough idea of their credit health. It would further be advantageous to configure such estimator such that it can be easily embedded into a partner's web site.
It would be advantageous to provide a system and method that determines the best action simulation, i.e. is the single most effective action of a set of actions to take by a consumer to increase the consumer's credit score.